Organizing Translation Content Using Projects

May 6, 2019 Kirk Bobash

The following are the best ways for organizing translation content using projects to optimize performance and organize content in your translation projects.

Knowing a bit about how Localize works will help you in making decisions about how best to organize your content into Localize Projects. Sometimes having all content in one Project makes sense, other times it’s best to split it into multiple projects.

If you have a lot of content to localize, the localization process can be better managed if some up-front planning is done for how to group that content into separate Projects.

How Translations Get to Your Website

Localize Translation Flowchart

The first time a user loads a page in your website, the Localize library is called to retrieve the translations for the currently selected target language.

Localize puts the translations for all published phrases in the Project (for the currently selected target language) into one file, and sends it back to the browser.

The translations are stored in the browser’s cache to optimize performance.

The Localize library then replaces the source language with the target language phrases in the current web page, and the web page is displayed to the user.

When the user navigates to another page, the translations are already loaded in the browser, so no translations need to be downloaded, resulting in a quicker load time on subsequent pages.

Best Practices for Creating Projects

The following recommendations are based on the way that Localize works, as seen above. The recommendations are also based on the types of content you are translating.

Separate Projects based on Logical Groupings of Content

If your content is grouped into logical areas, you may want a separate Project for each area.

For example: If you have a separate blog site, or a separate help site, creating a Project for each separate site/area is recommended.

You may also want to keep any mobile app content separate from your website content.

Since the workflows for getting content translated for a mobile app are sometimes different than those for translating website content, having separate Projects helps in managing the translation workflows.